Spoilers! Binged with the wife over Christmas Break. Extremely well-written, with deliberate and meditative sequences1, truly breathtaking camerawork, fantastic background scores, and large doses of dark humor. All the stuff we’ve come to expect from Gilligan & Co. who appear to have used ever…
I get around 8-10 calls from 1-8xx numbers every single day, most of them pertaining to financial scams (I get as many text messages as well). A few leave voicemail and the GIF at the end of this note shows about two weeks’ worth. I’ve taken to silencing unknown numbers on my iPhone. The Do Not Call Registry is on a quick little break right now.
Americans have received 4.1 billion robocalls so far this year, or around 135 million each day. A recent survey by Talker Research of 10,500 general population adults indicates that Americans get twice as many scam calls and texts as any other country (and even more than countries that have passed useful consumer protection laws and have functional regulators).
Actually doing something about a problem everyone agrees is awful would be antithetical to Free Market principles, a blot on the idea of Freedom itself, and would precipitate the demise of our thriving republic. Because all regulation is evil, I’ll just sack up and wait for The Market to sort it all out 🥰
Here’s one way to recycle batteries (via). I remember BestBuy having a battery dropoff but they don’t appear to accept them anymore.
I’ve used Panasonic’s Eneloop rechargeable batteries for a long while with very few complaints. The last ‘regular’ battery I purchased was an Energizer Ultimate Lithium for a 10-year AirTag in my traveling suitcase.
AUSTIN, TX—Stressing that the billionaire’s completely erratic behavior had strained the already fraught relationships, sources confirmed Thursday that a rift was widening between Elon Musk and anyone who had ever met him. “Elon’s megalomania and tendency to lash out indiscriminately seem to have…
Read these two articles on the OpenAI and Jony Ive collab. Smelled some familiar bullshit first and felt some déjà vu next.
Altman told employees that they had “the chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here,” he said after announcing OpenAI’s plans to purchase Ive’s startup, named io, and give him an expansive creative and design role.
Thought the biggest thing you set out to do was Artificial General Super Intelligence (for the benefit of all humankind, of course).
Anyway. Ive’s company has a “staff of roughly 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists and product development specialists” (source) who appear to be experimenting furiously with what to make, for this is what we’re told the thing will do:
The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users off of screens. Altman said the device also isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.
Sounds like a sleeker version of this flaming piece of shit daring foray into the future of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction:
Marques Brownlee thought it was “Barely Reviewable”. I do like how it looks though.
Can’t wait for the Ive video introducing it. And he wouldn’t be the first ex-Apple person with too much money who had an idea on how to transform our relationship with our computers. Altman invested in that disaster too.
But I’m a know-nothing curmedgeon and it’s certainly possible that this will be an unalloyed success in the hands of these wizened titans of industry (even if Uber-Curmudgeon Ed Zitron doesn’t think so.) I wish the happy couple the very best of luck 💝
I finally switched over from Chrome to Firefox, after switching away from the latter over 12 years ago. I’d basically given up on any shred of privacy I might have left on the internet, but the final straw for me was Chrome totally bypassing the DNS blocklists on my PiHole1 (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Unsurprisi…
NEW YORK—Claiming he could easily fit into a similar position at most companies, local CEO Mike Waltke told reporters Monday that his skill set was transferable to any job that requires an inept dumbass to receive a big salary. “I have the incompetence necessary to effortlessly transition into a…
Was doing some digital house-keeping and came by a cached copy of that by MisterBG. Things haven’t changed too much over the past two decades……
Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.…
Spent a decent portion of my professional life with init.d. Had to deploy a set of Ubuntu servers last week (use FreeBSD at home), which marked my first actual brush with systemd after a long while of sysadmin-ing Linux systems. It’s weird, takes some getting used to, and has a lovely Enterprise™ s…
Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it’s currently in one of its one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it. @chasemit…
Things are going well with the Metaverse: In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, [Vishal] Shah1 said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this o…
Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially d…
Here’s Bryan Cantrill’s classic assessment of Oracle Corporation (taken from this talk.) On Twitter, a year after that video: If you were an enterprise database customer who hadn’t heard of the Nazis, might it be easiest to explain them with Oracle allegory?…
The Dune screenplay was written on MS-DOS on a program app called “Movie Master”. It has a 40 page limit which helps the writer, Eric Roth. Writing is fundamentally about putting your ass in the chair and typing the words. Eliminating distractions (I’ve checked Twitter at least five times while…
This is for children under 13. Because children over 13 engage with Social Media in very healthy and fruitful ways. “They are also simply too young to navigate the complexities of what they encounter online, including inappropriate content and online relationships where other users, including pre…
A most dangerous Easter Egg by Microsoft, known only to the most elite of hackers.…
There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake a…
Terra, Gossip’s Web, and Marijn’s Linkroll remind my (oldass) self of a more innocent time when one would ‘surf the internet’, come by a list of links another human being liked, and discover all sorts of strange and wacky handmade things. I think I’m saying I really miss how fun something like Geoc…
Back in the good old days – the “Golden Era” of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called “Real Men” and “Quiche Eaters” in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that…
The focus of this project is to build a super reliable, durable, and stable network device from tried and tested tech. This is not a project for pushing the limits or testing out flashy new stacks. This affinity for ‘boring’ technology will reflect on most of the choices made here, from the hardwa…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk…
by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen…
This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly: Humans naturally resist change Your change is for the better Customers should just get use…
Gone is the gimmicky TouchBar, gone are the four USB-C ports that forced power users to carry a suitcase full of dongles. In their place we get a cornucopia of developer-friendly ports: two USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 ports, a redesigned power connector, and a long-awaited HDMI port. Photographers…
They use a pantograph to etch things out, after which they ‘tampograph’ the logo (at 1:45.)…
When you’re following a bunch of feeds, it’s easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn’t just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks. These are stories that get reposted a lot. Many…
Security by Obscurity is when you hide how a security measure works, not when you keep some part of it a secret. Daniel Miessler, “No, Moving Your SSH Port Isn’t Security by Obscurity” (Cached) As a former sysadmin (but no expert on security): This should be read and re-read. After which one…
I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw…
“Our hip product designers all agree: Adding significant noise via tiny profile pictures allows our users to tell, at a glance, who is online and who isn’t.” “And no, you cannot opt out. Because fuck you. What’re your options? MatterMost? 🖕😂🖕”…
Of course. Well, the transaction was in person and in cash (of course.) It was just a little bag of weed sold through an Arpanet account in Stanford’s artificial intelligence lab in 1972. It’s not clear who was in on the sale aside from the students, but despite the underhanded nature of the deal…
Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I2fMf0xtCQ You can use the same technique on a…
It’s a well-known fact that computers run faster in the evening. Robert Virding…
If impatient, skip to the last minute.…
It’s priced at $475 for the basic model and $800 for a deluxe version. The video is very satisfying to watch (I couldn’t have picked better background music.) One could start with a Brachiograph for around $20 (basic Raspberry Pi setup, soldering skills, and assembly required.)…
Dec 9 It’s so bad a Swiss company made a much saner substitute that sells for ~$20. Nov 16 Looks like you can use the old remote with the new AppleTV. I’m annoyed every time I have to use the infernal thing. It tries (poorly) to be something other than a damn TV remote1. There’s no way to…
I absolutely love Dustin Curtis’ splendid explanation of “AppleTV” branding that’s making making the rounds on HN. For posterity, I stole this handy color-coded transcription off Michael Tsai’s blog. See also: The intractably stupid AppleTV Remote.…
When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he…
In Ramayya Vasthavayya, Avinash is a mononymous “Central Crime Branch” officer who, according to the barcode on his IDENTITY CARD, loves new-agey mind meld books. Or so I gather. Couldn’t decipher the other barcode but submit that it might reveal his preference for reasonably priced cutlery sets at…
A nice little quiz meant to illustrate how much your typical Python and Bash code can accomplish in one second. If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :) and A newer computer won’t make your code run 1000x…
Ramin Nazer on some models he entertains of what happens to us after we die. A few of my favorites…
Gave Hugo a try and was quite impressed by the ease and speed. The official documentation kinda sucks at introducing key ideas (like taxonomies) in a gradual way that’s helpful to newcomers, but is great for variable and function references. Found these two posts very helpful. Here’s another that e…
The Des Moines Register on how to send them email in (I’m guessing) the late 80s/early 90s. An article on how Baud Rate isn’t the same as Bit Rate Baud rate refers to the number of signal or symbol changes that occur per second. A symbol is one of several voltage, frequency, or phase changes.…